Page 1 of Ballad of Sea and Sky

Chapter 1

“Marina!”Sereiahissed,crossingher arms against the cold wind. “This is one of your worst ideas! What will this prove?”

I rolled my eyes at my friend, pulling off my sealskin wrap and shivering. The autumn wind was more of a gale than a breeze. The sea was choppy and agitated around the island, and the rocks jutted up dangerously from the black water, difficult to see in the fading light. I would need to be careful not to hit one as I passed.

“I just want to see it with my own eyes,” I said, rolling my eyes at Sereia’s coddling.

My lady-in-waiting looked far more the princess than I did. We had the same warm brown skin, although mine was dotted with pale freckles, but her hair was a cascade of soft shining silver, always perfectly styled and pinned. Mine was usually a mass of unruly blue-green waves, no matter how she tried to help me tame it. She was proper and modest in every way a selkie female was expected to be.

I was not.

She frowned, narrowing her eyes at me. “No you don’t,” she argued. “Yesterday you told Vitulus and his men that only a fool would go swimming at night at this time of year. What is this really about?”

“Seas below, it’s cold,” I said, sucking in a breath as I entered the frigid water. I felt my legs transform the moment I hit the cold seawater, connecting and rounding as the seal tail took shape. My fingers webbed, preparing to propel me through the water, and I shuddered. “And I felt that Vitulus could use some humbling. He’s severe and pompous.”

“And handsome,” Sereia replied coyly. I felt, rather than saw, her suggestive eyebrow waggle.

I grimaced. “Handsomeness doesn’t make up for lacking a personality,” I retorted, steeling myself for my dive. “Plus, this is the closest I’ll ever get to seeing one in person. Aren’t you curious?”

I turned, looking at my friend huddled on the rocks and clearly cold and miserable. “No,” she said sulkily. “And your parents will be furious if they find out. Please don’t do this.”

“I’ll be ten minutes,” I said, giving my friend an encouraging look as she pulled her shawl more tightly around her. “And I’ll take full responsibility.”

“You always say that,” Sereia sighed, glancing up at the rising moon, barely a sliver of silver in the sky. “You’d better be fast. It will be too dark to see in a minute.”

“Luckily, I have selkie eyes,” I replied with a grin. “Time me!”

I dove before I had more time to reconsider the intelligence of my plan. Diving into the cold waters felt like coming home, and the sea welcomed me into its embrace. While everyone in my life told me to uphold tradition and be cautious, the sea was the wild voice in my ear that dared me to swim farther and faster, to follow my heart rather than the whims of my family.

She was the perfect ally for my misadventures.

I had overheard the scholars discussing the discovery with my father the night before. They had found a statue in a sea cave and determined the piece unworthy of preservation. I wanted to see it, just once, before the sea destroyed it.

The water was dark and frigid, but my eyes weren’t the problem when I swam. Like all selkies, I had excellent underwater vision, and my webbed fingers and tail made moving through the water as easy as any aquatic creature.

The problem was my lungs.

Most selkies could hold air in their lungs for at least half an hour, sometimes longer. Vitulus had once claimed to me stoically that he could stay submerged for two hours, which I grudgingly admitted was a possibility. He was the strongest and fastest selkie in the Silent Isles, which is why he had been named the Captain of the Royal Guard.

But something had gone wrong with my lungs. I hadn’t been breathing when I was born. The way my mother told the story, it was a full minute before I took my first breath, and all the healers said I wouldn’t survive. But—shealwaysadded this when she told me the story—I was her miracle. The seas had blessed her, granting her prayer that I breathe and thrive and grow.

My lungs, however, would never be completely healthy. On my good days, I could hold my breath for maybe five minutes before I needed air, making it impossible for me to venture into the deeper ocean, or to swim easily between the islands of the archipelago. On my bad days, especially during the colder months, I struggled to breathe on dry land as well. If I even walked too fast or too far, my lungs would rebel, constricting and making me wheeze and panic as I struggled for breath.

The attacks were unpredictable and increasingly frequent, and the healers had tried everything short of venturing to the mainland to cure me. They prayed to the seas, and poked and prodded, and for twenty-five years, they had predicted that each year would be my last. Yet here I was,mostlyfine as long as I was careful.

Naturally, I had grown up to be the least careful person I knew. I was curious, and I hated being told I couldn’t do something for my safety. Despite my mother’s fussing and my father’s fuming at me over every little infraction, my recklessness had nothing to do with being a princess, or entitlement, or trying to prove myself.

It was the knowledge that I would never be completely safe in my own body that drove me to be a little reckless. My time was limited, and the good days were becoming less and less common, so I took advantage when I had them.

Luckily, today was a good day, or as good as my lungs ever were, and if the scholars were to be believed, I could make it to the sea cave in four minutes. It was submerged almost all of the time, except at low tide when the sea receded enough, leaving a pocket of air in the cave perfect for a selkie with terrible lungs.

The water was dark and cold as I moved, looking out for the markings the scholars had left to guide their explorations. The archipelago was home to thousands of sea caves, some completely submerged, some hiding in plain sight, and in the five centuries my family had been in control of the island range, the scholars had explored only a handful. They preferred to focus on recording old texts and preserving selkie murals, rather than cataloging artifacts from a conquered people.

I saw the markings the scholars had described on a rock and swam deeper, the cold water making me shiver despite the warmth that wrapped around my lower half. Lore told of powerful selkies in our history who could shift completely, becoming seals when they entered the ocean and reemerging in their fae forms. I wasn’t sure such stories were true, but it would be nice to be entirely wrapped in a cozy layer of blubber, rather than freezing off my bare arms.

The water grew darker as night fell upon me, and after what I estimated to be three minutes, I saw the sea cave opening the scholars had described. Breaching the water’s surface was glorious as blessed, life-giving air filled my lungs, and I gasped a little too greedily as I swam to the water line.

Low tide wouldn’t last long, and Sereia would lose patience eventually and fetch Vitulus, who would scold me in that unbending way of his. I moved quickly through the cave, cursing the sharp stones underfoot as I tried to find the relic in the darkness.